


Stained Glass

by anomieow



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Angst, Attempted Underage, Bottom Sol, Christianity, Drug Use, First Time, Hand Job, Internalized Homophobia, Loss of Virginity, M/M, Modern AU, Oral Sex, Semi Public Sex, Spanking, Tenderness, Threesome, Toxic Hickey Polycule, additional warnings in end notes, drug overdose
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-11
Updated: 2020-12-30
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:54:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 12,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26950975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anomieow/pseuds/anomieow
Summary: Sol Tozer’s life is already complicated: he loves two men, the tender-hearted meth addict Thomas “Armie” Armitage, and the volatile but charming small-time drug dealer Neil Hickey. But things get even more complex when he’s introduced to the shy, closeted youth pastor of a nearby church.
Relationships: Cornelius Hickey/Dr Alexander McDonald, Cornelius Hickey/Sgt Solomon Tozer, Dr. Alexander McDonald/Thomas Armitage, Lt John Irving/Sgt Solomon Tozer, Sgt Solomon Tozer/Cornelius Hickey/Thomas Armitage, Thomas Armitage/Sgt Solomon Tozer
Comments: 18
Kudos: 33





	1. Chapter 1

Sol’s traded up to a ‘99 Honda Civic since Neil saw him last but Neil doesn’t give a fuck. 

“See?” Sol pounds the dash with a flattened palm, grins. “180k miles but she runs decent. Me and Armie had to drop a new trans in but other than that just real minor fixes.”

Neil levels him and with a look that’s half loathing and half leer as he lights the Marlboro Light he’s fished out of the soft pack on the dash. “I didn’t do eighteen fucking months,” he exhales, “to hear first thing what you and Armie been up to while I was gone.”

Sol’s grin slackens but his eyes are still bright, still drinking in the sight of Neil. He’s thinner, the shadow thrown by his clavicle longer than it should be in the hot pour of the afternoon sun, and his hair’s buzzed up to just past his ears. The copper sheaf up top is gelled all to one shining side. Sol misses the ponytail but he’ll never tell him that. 

“I fucking missed you,” he says instead.

“I know you did, baby. We gonna celebrate or what?” 

Sol shrugs, grins, exits the freeway against the blinding sun. He knows a place. He drives into the glare, squinting the whole time even behind his shades. He takes Bison Road past the megachurch— _that’s new,_ Neil notes, pointing at the sprawling, blocky amalgam of stained glass and taupe stucco, acres of parking spaces—and leaves behind the last of the strip malls, the fenced subdivisions, and then they’re out among undulating fields, a concertina of flushed grays and raw gold. Hot today but the thick of fall: windsock ghosts flutter on porches, leering jack-o-lanterns, and at night bare black trees rock in the wind like the masts of tossed ships. 

He passes at last the factory where Armie went half-deaf when an air pressurizer blew in his hands. _Coulda been worse,_ he’d told Sol, tilting his good ear to hear Sol laugh. _Ain’t one man in ten round here got all his fingers_ and takes a left, parking along the ditch edge of the gravel road leading to the old Catholic cemetery where Armie first kissed him when they were fifteen. 

Sol’s barely cranked the parking brake before Neil’s got his cock out and the passenger side seat scootched all the way back. “Show me how much you missed me,” he grins crookedly, stroking himself full. Sol crawls over, kneeling in the grit of the floorboard—Starburst wrappers, sand from the reservoir shore, an empty Red Bull can. He barely fits but that’s how Neil likes it: Sol’s thick, muscular body bowed down, boxed in. No place to go but further into Neil’s lap. So he buries that pretty pink prick gullet-deep and gags for show, gazing imploringly up like Neil taught him. But the sun’s too warm on the back of his neck; Neil’s hand too heavy. Maybe later, in the hotel, it’ll feel right again. He’ll be able to flow with it like he used to, he’ll get that feeling back of fitting just right wherever Neil puts him. So he moans around his dick to speed him along.

Armie’s mother’s expecting them both for dinner and (Armie told him with that quiet, silvery laugh of his, his dark-wash gaze dipping down to touch Sol’s mouth) she’s invited a surprise guest. 

“Jesus?” Sol deadpanned. “Did she invite Jesus? I know Him and her are real tight.”

“Close,” Armie answered. “That new youth pastor, I bet.”

“For fuck’s sake.”

Armie shrugged. “You’d better go,” he said, stabbing out his cigarette. “I got somebody to see.” 

“Who?”

“You know who.”

“He’s not gonna leave his wife for you. That’s just some shit he says.”

“I think it’s sweet that he pretends, at least,” Armie said then, not meeting Sol’s eyes as he walks him to the door. They shuffled awkwardly at each other before Armie lifted his face and Sol kissed the edge of his mouth.

“What, we can’t even kiss goodbye now?” Armie complained.

“Goodbye,” Sol answered, ducking out the door. On the stairs he met the doctor, Alex McDonald, and made a point of staring hard into his eyes as he greeted him and held him in awkward conversation just to—what? Embarrass him? Catch him off-guard? But his polished geniality has a kind of opacity to it; there’s nothing to see through and no angle to grab him by. With one last well wish for his mother, Alex swept past him and ascended the last few steps to Armie’s door. 

Sol thinks of Armie and the good doctor now as he unzips his fly with sudden urgency. What they must get up to: if it’s the same kind of thing he gets up to with Sol—slowly unwinding into each other, whimpering and clutching. _He’d better fucking not._ And anyway, the ob-gyn seems like one of those sick fucks who pays boys to step on his balls and call him names or some shit. And God help him, Sol thinks then of the face Armie makes when he comes, a litany of silent gasps sailing from that plush mouth shaped into a perfect _o_ —the eyebrows knit—if he shares that face with Alex too, if—

Then Neil’s little noises, arrhythmic pants and snatches of whining, congeal into words. “You like this?” He’s saying as he humps into Sol’s mouth. “You like sucking my dick, little bitch?” Sol nods instinctively. It always gets him when Neil talks to him like that: not the words but the fact that he’s not even saying them _to_ him. Sol’s just a wet socket, a bowed pair of tanned, muscular shoulders. Bowed for him. Sol comes abruptly thinking of them both at once, Armie shuddering beneath him and Neil jammed so far down his throat he can’t speak either of their names.  
Neil’s there a second later, thumping his palm against Sol’s shoulder so Sol’s ready for it, and comes with this quaking little moan like you wouldn’t expect from him. His nails biting pink moons in the back of Sol’s neck. “Fuck,” he whimpers, “ _fuck._ ” His face softens and for a moment the only sound is their breathing, heavy and just barely out of sync. 

Then Neil taps Sol’s lip. “All gone?” He asks. Sol opens his mouth, shows he’s swallowed it all. Lifts his tongue, even. “Good boy,” Neil grins, grabbing Sol by the back of his head and leaning forward so their faces are nearly touching. “Fucking missed you.” 

“Missed getting your dick sucked, you mean? Instead of the other way around? And worse than that, I bet.”

“I tried telling ‘em I was too pretty for jail,” Neil says, tilting his head and dropping his gaze. God, the day’s light’s grown heavy and warm as cream now and strikes copper sparks in his hair. Sol’s forgotten how sweet he can look, how small and naked. Like the orphan he is. 

( _That’s how he gets you,_ Armie said once. _Like how pups got sharper teeth than grown dogs._ )

———

Mrs. Armitage has made fried chicken and mashed potatoes whipped to a greasy froth. Green beans dumped from a can, microwaved to tepidity. She and Mrs. Irving keep conversation flowing between them, nattering like sparrows about people all of them except maybe Neil, who moved here when he was seventeen, and John Irving, who spent most of his childhood and adolescence traveling with his missionary father, have known all their lives. Mrs. Armitage keeps interrupting Mrs. Irving to thrust food at Neil, who neatly, almost daintily, devours all of it. Down to the last congealing globule of gravy. Five sons, and her favorite isn’t even one of them. 

After dinner, the four of them—Sol, Neil, Armie, and John, the youth pastor at the new mega-church—shuffle out to the little frosted glass table at the far end of the patio. It’s already started to grow dark and beyond the slanting pool of the porch light the grass is all black and blue. On the horizon, over the roofs and past crisscrossing power lines, Sol can see dark clouds curdled up against darker sky. Smell of woodsmoke, damp hovering chill. Sol wishes he’d brought his jacket but they’re already seated, and with the slack half-synchronicity of kids onstage at a pageant, they each fish a cigarette out of a soft pack: Marlboro Lights, each of them.

John, of course, does not light up but does his gallant best to not look disgusted as the others do. He’s good looking, John is, in a catalog kind of way: his bleach-tipped hair is carefully mussed (L.A. Look, Sol can smell it) and his full lips are framed by a meticulously trimmed goatee. His face is round and boyishly handsome in this way that seems bland at first, but Sol keeps looking, keeps glancing over him, not so much out of desire as out of curiosity. 

“So, John,” Neil says, French inhaling as naturally as breathing, “did you do good business down in Phoenix?”

“I wouldn’t call it business,” John says, all earnestness and ice at once. “It’s a calling.” Anyone else would smile, ask a question, push conversation along. Not John, who doesn’t seem to grasp how groups work. He’s not shy, like Armie’s sometimes shy, a sort of slippery muttering sweetness, but he’s not arrogant. He seems bewildered by it all, out of his depths: there’s a startled, thrashing animal at the back of his hazel gaze. He’s content to let the quiet heap like slush around them but not Neil. 

“I thought I had a calling once,” he continues, “selling methamphetamines. The man didn’t seem to think that constituted a valid occupation, so here we are.”

At this moment someone’s foot finds Sol’s ankle. He can’t tell if it’s Armie’s or Neil’s but either way he shakes it off. He glances between the two of them and they look at one another and then at him with a conspiratorial grin. John spears each of them in turn with an aggrieved glare. A split second later the wandering foot—Neil’s, apparently—lands against John’s thigh, for his eyebrows jump and legs of his chair scrape the concrete as he shoves himself back from the table. Sol could kill Neil, but the anger blazing up in John’s face is something, pinking his cheeks and knocking his mouth slightly ajar. 

“There is _always_ room in Christ’s heart for the repentant,” John lectures, but his heart’s not in it. Sol knows that look: a man who works so hard at what he loves that what he loves has worn him down. And anyway, John’s gay as fuck. He might tell himself he’s not, or just tell himself _no_ until it becomes its own little prayer, but he’s definitely gay. Sol’s got a sense for these things. If asked, he couldn’t explain it, but he’s rarely wrong: maybe it’s something in the eyes. Maybe it’s that panicked animal feel shimmering just behind a face meant to be fiercely brave: that, too, is something Sol knows like he knows his own face in the mirror. 

———

The hotel room’s dark and warm and smells like cheap detergent and old smoke, but stepping in and closing the door behind him, Sol feels like he’s coming home. For Armie and Neil are already there waiting for him, sprawled side by side on the bed. Their faces are wanly illuminated by the muted television. 

“Hi, baby,” Neil says, coming up onto his elbows and Sol feels his throat tighten, his face twist into a grin. Now the three of them are together again for the first time in a year and a half. It’ll fall apart again soon enough, the rickety home the three of them make of one another’s bodies: the foundations are slanted and the timber’s weak. But tonight will be everything. Something fine and whole and perfect. He smoked a joint on the way over from the Safeway and is feeling it open in his blood, making time glitch and his thoughts loop and ebb. His grin deepens as he studies them in the dim light. 

Neil’s stripped down to his boxers. He’s so pale that he almost glows in this muddy way, and Armie’s eyes gleam—dilated—beneath a damp, dark lank of curls. Neil languidly looks Sol up and down back and, apparently approving of what he sees, pats his thigh. Sol doesn’t know who to go to first but they swarm him over, Armie kissing him and reaching one-handed for his fly (he likes to feel him get hard in his hand but he’s too late for that) while Neil latches hard onto the juncture between his throat and collar. It’s a little like drowning and a little like flying and it’s too much, Armie hurriedly trying to jerk him off, moaning like it’s his own dick he’s touching—which, when he’s stoned, it kind of is. His whole slender, burning body is a network of taut strings, ready to sing. It should be the other way around, Sol straddling Armie, working his way down to the eager bulge in his cargo shorts. He can make him feel so good. He can make him fucking weep. 

“You taste so good, Sol,” Neil pants into his neck. “I could fucking eat you up.” He grabs Sol by the curls and wrenches his head round so he’s kissing him instead. He kisses like he fights, smart and brutal, and Armie’s hand glides up the back of his shirt, massaging his muscular shoulders as his other hand pulls swiftly, almost frantically, at his cock. Neil works his way loose of his mouth and trails sharp little kisses down his throat and collar, then goes to unbutton his shirt. 

“Fuck,” he says in soft surprise, helping Sol out of it. “Those look amazing. For me?”

“For you,” Sol says softly.

Neil’s eyes flutter shut as, with uncharacteristic gentleness, he closes his teeth around one of the glinting rings pierced through Sol’s nipples and tugs. The tip of his tongue flicks against the stiffened flesh for a moment before he closes his lips around it, sucking and yanking—Christ, but he gets so rough so quick. And it feels amazing. Between Neil’s mercenary mouth and the businesslike pistoning of Armie’s fist, Sol knows they’re racing to get him off right quick in order to have all night to work him loose, to give him time to relish the ways they’ll use him. When he comes, it will be be because they want him to—Neil wants him to. All this makes him feel strangely pure, like a pane of window through which light passes altered—a shard of stained glass. Then Armie’s sticking his finger into Sol’s mouth and he sucks and licks til it’s dripping slick, and with that finger he trails a path across his taint, toward his hole—Sol humps into Armie’s hand, pants out, “I’m gonna—fuck, please, Neil, can I—“

Neil nods and sinks his teeth in, a swift and brutal bite right behind where the ring’s pierced through, and Sol lets go, panting broken curses as he gobs onto Armie’s fist and spatters Neil’s hair, which has fallen loose and hides his face in its soft shadow. 

After that, Sol softens, lets himself drift weightless as he is maneuvered onto his hands and knees so Armie can lower his mouth to him from behind while in the front Neil expertly fucks Sol’s mouth with his fingers. He takes it all with the watchful docility of a faithful dog, mouth and finger and cock, and when he’s emptied out and dripping, ablaze with pain and limping, he thanks them for it. It’s only later, after Neil’s fallen asleep, that Armie drags Sol into the shower and chastely, meticulously cleans him. “I’m sorry,” he keeps saying, “I’m sorry.” 

Sol doesn’t know what he’s apologizing for, doesn’t ask. Just closes his eyes and leans into the soft circling of the soapy hotel washrag across his shoulders, the polite smell of the sample soap. 

“I wish you wouldn’t apologize, man,” he says finally. “There’s nothing to be sorry for.”

Armie regards him seriously, nods. “Yeah. But I’m sorry all the same.”


	2. Chapter 2

“I can’t believe you’ve been keeping this to yourself,” Neil grins to Armie as his palm slices resoundingly down onto the reddened buttocks of the older man bent over the cheap mauve armchair in Neil’s bedroom. Him and Armie and Sol have been tugging the place together piecemeal for the past couple weeks since Neil’s been out. It’s a little double-wide, wood-paneled and haunted by that weird cat shit and old potpourri smell all mobile homes seem to have. Rust and white marl shag carpeting, battered Venetian blinds. Big-ass television the only nice thing—that, and in the bedroom where they are now, mirrored sliding closet doors that Neil likes to watch himself fuck in. 

But right now he’s got the chair angled just so he can see the face of the tall, blandly handsome doctor as he’s up-ended over the arm of this chair from The Salvation Army shop. He can see that mouth loosen, spilling out a gasp of mixed joy and pain each time Neil’s palm strikes home; he can see the grit teeth and screwed shut eyes right after. There’s nothing formal about this; he’s just spanking him for the hell of it. Nor does he find the man as attractive as Armie does, who’s just as smitten with him as he is with Sol or anyone else he can stick his dick in. Armie’s dumb about people and doesn’t know what love is. Neil does. But he keeps it secret, what he knows and how he knows it, and it’s got nothing to do with the choices he makes. 

He comes round front of this guy, this doctor who spends his days knuckle-deep in vagina, and grabs him by his hair. “I bet you’re shit at sucking dick,” he announces.

“He’s decent,” Armie opines from his place on the bed, where he’s playing keychain Tetris. He’s got his bare feet crossed at the ankle and doesn’t look up when he speaks. Next to him, Sol appears to be dozing. 

“Decent ain’t good enough for this dick,” Neil says, jabbing his fingers into Alex’s mouth. 

“Whatever, dude,” Sol mutters, his voice thick with half-sleep. “You’d stick your dick in a blender if someone told you it’d get sucked.”

Alex is carefully licking and sucking each finger in turn, though Neil’s hands are dirty with the taste of coins from his shift at the gas station. You don’t know how dirty money is until you handle someone else’s all day. How much do doctors make, anyway? This man whose mouth he’s humping with his fingers probably earns more in a year than he’ll put by in a whole life of tedious shitwork. This man’s paid for more happiness in twenty minutes than Neil will have at once if he lives to be a hundred. He yanks his fingers from his mouth and swings the mud-caked steel toe of his boot up onto the arm of the chair, coming up an inch short of shattering his teeth. “Make these shine,” he says, all genial sangfroid. “Then we’ll see if you’re even decent.” 

He hesitates for certain, glancing at Armie like he expects reprieve, but then his tongue’s out. Neil knows what mud tastes like, the nails-on-a-chalkboard gritty feel of it between his teeth. All kids remember that, don’t they? Some cousin crushing their face into the dirt? He watches a blackish streak transfer to the pink of Alex’s tongue and Alex looks uncertain, queasy.

“Quit,” Neil says, crossing behind for another hard smack to his ass. “I just wanted to see if you’d actually do it. You fucking freak. You can still suck my dick though if you want.”

“This is stupid,” Sol says, sitting up. “I told John I might could help him with his car. Y’all have fun.” 

“Wait,” Neil says. “He can suck your dick instead.”

“I don’t need my dick sucked, Neil. I need to get the fuck out of here. It’s gonna get too weird for me.”

“You scared I’m gonna get me a new pet?”

“Nah.” He pauses to kiss Neil on the way out. “Don’t be mad. Just not my thing.”

Neil kisses back, open-mouthed and soft, his hands on Sol’s arms, palms charting the hard thick curves of his biceps. Fuck. It’s not even his thing. Armie had said Alex wanted something harder than he could offer, so, while he had no experience professionally, Neil figured he could make a few bucks humiliating this guy. Fine. And it was fun in the way climbing a high tree or railroad trestle and looking down is fun: the spike the height gives you. But right now, the way Sol’s rolling his belly against him and kissing him like he really means it, like he’s trying to crawl into him mouth-first—he wishes it was just them is all. But Sol leaves anyhow, pulling on his jacket as he goes.

———

John lives in one of the new apartment complexes at the edge of town. Behind it lies a marshland of stunted trees and tall grasses with a gravel path running through it. It’s a wide-open space—wide-open sky, and John can see the whole of the heavens shift from blue to paler blue to orange at the near horizon, cluttered with more apartments and subdivisions. When he was a boy, this land was wild—the gas station up the block was the edge of the civilized world. Still, it’s nice how slow the darkness spreads here at the outskirts; there’s still enough quiet that when the wind is still you can hear the traffic on the turnpike.

Sol’s standing near close enough to touch shoulders on John’s little balcony, their elbows on the railing. John doesn’t mind the proximity—it’s cold—nor the smoke off Sol’s cigarette that the damp breeze rolls back in his face. They’ve been out working on John’s car; Sol’s spent the day leaned over under the propped-open hood of John’s 1994 Volvo wagon and had gotten it running smoothly. Then they’d ordered pizza and watched a half hour or so of an uneventful MMA match before Sol stood up, fishing a cigarette out of the beaten soft pack in his front pocket, and headed out to the patio. John followed a moment later. Sol looked good. There were patches of oil on his holey white pocket tee and as he leaned over the railing the worn, sweat-damp cotton cling to the heavy curves of his muscles. His hands were filthy and flecked with grease smudges and cuts, little licks of drying blood. John imagined, and in the same moment forbade himself from imagining, those dirty callused palms on his body. 

Sol doesn’t talk just to talk and John likes that about him. For one thing, half of what comes out of his mouth is pure sin; he does drugs and he’s a homosexual and doesn’t even pretend not to be. Now, John has carnal thoughts about men but they don’t count since he resists them: that’s the whole point of them. Little hurdles Jesus lays out before him until the day he meets the girl he’s supposed to marry. He puts these thoughts there, like this thought he currently has of just innocent-like nuzzling his lips up against Sol’s big hard shoulder, so that when he doesn’t do it He will know he’s pure. See if he tastes like he looks to taste, like sweat and grease. Then Sol would turn his head, kiss him on the lips—but see, he doesn’t do these things because he’s good. 

And soon enough he’ll have earned His esteem enough that he will be presented with his bride. It will be like a lightning bolt strikes; he figures he’ll know her as clear as he knows his right hand. A cute, Christly little thing she’ll be, clear-eyed and—what? She’s not really even built in his head but he figures she’ll be pretty and love only Jesus more than she loves him. Never mind that looking at Sol he gets the feeling he expected to feel about her. Normally when he’s tempted they’re rough and mean with him, the men he imagines about. Like when Kevin from the gym shoves himself into John’s mouth til he’s gagging and crying? And then he comes on his face, grinning? Gosh, Jesus must’ve worked real hard on crafting that one. 

Never mind that he feels a lot more something about Sol than he ever has anyone else. He doesn’t just want Sol to jerk off onto his face—though in his repertoire of sinful theoretical fantasies, that’s been a favorite of late—but he feels good around him. Like whatever he says and does will he just fine. It’s like Sol sees him in whole, top to bottom, nods once, and says, _Good. Fine._

But then, given the quality of his other friends, of which Neil and Armie seem to be the closest, it’s not hard to be the best man. And Mother’s been privy to some very concerning gossip pertaining to a certain popular doctor in town and the boy Armie, but who knows what kinds of relationships these homosexuals have? He can’t imagine any reason for them to be monogamous, seeing as they’re already well out of God’s graces.

“What are they like?” John asks impulsively. “Neil and Armie and them? Are they all right?”

“Armie’s just fine.” He taps his cigarette with a tap of his thumb and they both watch the ash drift down. “And Neil... well, Neil’s a lot of things, but all right ain’t one of them. Neil’s a fucking psychopath and I strongly discourage a sweet thing like yourself from associating with him.” Sol’s got this tone like he could be kidding or could be serious, but John’s own instinct advises him it’s the latter. He’d had trouble in his eyes, that little red-haired man. There was a boy he knew when he and his father were down in Nicaragua, a boney little scrap of a kid who’d learned English and translated for his village; he was quick talking and his eyes were the color of pitch and he said he was a true believer in Christ. And then one night he tried to drown his baby sister in a cistern. Neil’s got that same look.

“Why are you friends with him?”

Sol shrugs and flicks the butt, still smoldering, down two stories into a puddle in the parking lot below. “Because we get along. Do you like it here?” He asks, changing the subject. He turns so his back is to the railing, his face angled just so—if John wished to kiss him, he could. But he doesn’t. ( _She’ll know how good you’ve been,_ he thinks to himself. _All the snares you’ve avoided._ )

“I do,” John says, glad for something to patter about. “There’s a tennis court, so that’s nice. Do you play?”

“Do I look like I play?”

John laughs, shakes his head. “I don’t either.”

“I didn’t figure. Me and Armie used to come up here when we were kids. This was the edge of town back then.”

“I know. We used to live out here. Me and my father shot ducks in that marsh.” 

“Ain’t that something. Me and Armie used to do the same. You and your daddy ever cross paths with a couple boys, looked like they were up to no good?”

“I don’t remember. Wouldn’t that have been something.” 

Sol shrugs. “Fate,” he snorts. His eyes are tracing the curves of John’s profile, he can feel it. He’s always just looking at him, thoughtful and pleased-like, and it drives John crazy deep down in his bones. It really does. John turns to look him in the eye and they’re close, so close; it feels just like that moment in the movies where the boy is about to kiss the girl so John waits, still as a rabbit panicked. But instead Sol grins and leans back.

“I ain’t put here as a temptation, John. I get it, I do. But think of it this way: if that’s my job here, then that kinda makes me a sort of... figment of your imagination, don’t it? You can see how a man might feel a little insulted by that.” 

Irving looks as though he’s been struck. Then he says, “we’re only friends, Sol. But if you’re going to take every sign of plain Christian amity as some sort of perverted invitation, you had better just leave and take your soul sickness with you.”

“My soul sickness, huh?” Sol laughs and grins big, then leans across the inches between them, rests his soft mouth on John’s for the split second it takes for John’s lips to part and let him in. As quick as it’s begun it’s over, and Sol is walking inside and pulling on his jacket. “Don’t feel like no sickness I’ve ever caught,” he says as he’s leaving.


	3. Chapter 3

Kids on the porch. Not kid kids but they seem like kids now, tail end of high school and brave behind their masks and grease paint. Smoking like they’re proud of it: Sol can remember that, a time before it was a nasty habit and the smoke rolled into your lungs all coarse and silken at once. You didn’t need it then and when you exhaled you felt like someone on a tv show. They watch him and Neil and Armie pull up and give them space as they mount the steps to the house. It’s Neil, mostly, that they stare at. In the halls of the high school and in black-lit stoner bedrooms, he’s spoken of as a kind of minor legend. 5’7” and a faggot, sure, but mean as hell. They say that he knifed a cop. They say that he beat a man twice his size so bad he went deaf. They say that he sells a strain of weed so potent you might go crazy if you smoke it and they’ll put you away in the state hospital at Vinita. But kids are dumb. First off, it wasn’t a cop, it was an off-duty mall security guard. Second, Armie, who’s maybe fifteen percent bigger than Neil, was deaf before Neil hospitalized him. And last, it wasn’t any of Neil’s weak-ass ditchweed that sent Sol to Vinita; it was the scars all up his wrists and arms and he did that himself. 

The party is at the house of Charlie Des Voeux, some rich kid whose parents are out of town. It’s a perfect house for a Halloween party: there are two rich neighborhoods in town, one with old houses and one with new, and this is an old rich house, a sprawling craftsman in which everything is either wooden or rich red; Sol used to think he’d live in a house just like it when he grew up. He’s been over a few times to drop off contraband or party or just whatever; for awhile Charlie and Armie were fucking which was great because they met at the same Pray-the-Gay-Away camp, and so he knows it feels dark even in bright days. With sun pouring through its thousand windows. It’s just how it is: it has that creeping hand-over-your-mouth feeling that even beautiful houses get when unhappy people live in them. So for Halloween it’s nice: a little shiver of a true haunting. 

Sol’s dressed as a skeleton: same costume every year. He spent an hour on his makeup, getting the angle of the black sockets around his eyes just the perfect balance between mean and mischievous, the little cracks as spire-like as lightning along his temples just perfect. He pulled on his hoodie and sweatpants with the glow in the dark bones on them and slicked his thick hair back. He looked good. Then he went out into the overgrown backyard and laid down in the dry grass. Sometimes he did this and didn’t know why but it was nice in the calm, chill dusk to watch the stars appear one by one out of the thickening nothing. He was not thinking about John until he realized he absentmindedly was, the way one reflexively scratches an itch and brings up blood. He sat up in the grass, tense with anger, lit a cigarette, and took a deep drag. Breathed the incipient rage out with the smoke.

Now he’s on his way into this party and the fact that there are so many kids here starts to make him mad too. Neil looks this one boy sprawled on the steps up and down, and turns over his shoulder to get another good eyeful before he goes inside. 

“You’d better fucking not,” Sol mutters.

“He’s a baby,” Armie adds.

“Seventeen at least,” Neil says, and later, when Sol spots Neil and the boy from the porch sitting real close on the couch, he starts to get mad. But he takes a deep breath and decides he’ll just be heroic instead, if need be, even if it means getting his ass kicked. Because Sol doesn’t get mad on Halloween. Halloween is one of the only things that gives him that child-like feeling that the world is enormous and wild. He’s foolishly fond of all its campy regalia, hollow plastic jack-o-lanterns and leering skulls, black cats with arched backs and bristling fur. It’s not his best Halloween—he’s been feeling half-dead exhausted lately, coked-up and perpetually hazy drunk, and has been fucked so hard and often lately he just lets his dick take over and daydreams about being left alone. Or John. But that’s another thought that could mess up his favorite night good, so he won’t entertain it.

Yet there he is, the motherfucker, and of course he’s dressed as an angel. A long white gown billows over the toes of white sneakers and radiating from his back is a pair of wings made of bent coat hangers and pantyhose. Above his head bobs a tinsel halo. Tight-lipped, brows furrowed, it’s a toss-up whether he’s more angry with his companion or baffled by her. A liquid-limbed, giggling blonde thing, she’s dressed as what must be a cowgirl—at least that’s what the hat and fringe and boots indicate, even if that’s about all she’s wearing. With a grin (and one eye still on Hickey and the boy) he wades over to him. A nod, half a grin. “Didn’t think y’all celebrated Halloween,” he says, ducking his lips down to John’s ear so he can hear.

“I’m not a Pentecostal, Sol,” John says earnestly, watching with a complete lack of concern as the girl waves at someone on the other side of the room and disappears. “My mother, the matchmaker,” he says flatly. 

“Not your type, John?”

“I would prefer... a more modest girl.” 

“Yeah? Is that what you prefer?” Sol tilts his head as he takes John’s beer from his hand and takes a sip. “Didn’t think you drank either.”

“Special occasion.”

Sol presses a little closer and puts one hand on the wall behind John’s head. “What else do you allow yourself on special occasions?”

John gives him a small shy smile, drops his gaze, takes a sip from the bottle Sol’s lips have just touched. In the nectary light of the crowded, low-ceilinged room, it looks like he colors up. Sol’s about to suggest going some place quieter when a commotion behind them distracts them both. Sol turns around just in time to see a tall, stern-faced man in his fifties bodily haul the boy from the porch off Neil’s lap. 

“I know who you are,” he says in a menacingly soft voice, pointing at Neil. “And I will make you very much regret ever touching my son.” 

Neil’s up quick, and with a single glance at one another Sol and John lunge for him, John grabbing his arms and Sol getting between him and the man. “It’s not worth it, man,” Sol says to him. “He’ll fucking lay you out _and_ you’ll go back to jail.” Neil nods, him and the guy still staring at each other, and, wresting his arms free of John, holds up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “He gets around, though,” Neil calls at his retreating back. “You should know. I ain’t the only one!” But they’re gone, threading through the parted tide of gawking faces and out the open front door. Afterwards, Neil’s quiet, tense; he tries to sucker Armie into a fight and when that fails corners John about pulling his arms back. “You don’t fuck with me like that,” he says, shaking his finger in John’s face. “You don’t fucking touch me unless you have permission.” 

“Sol was right,” John explains cautiously. There are a few of them out on the back porch here, smoking and talking quietly. It’s the kind of looping, deep talk strangers at parties at two in the morning stumble into, a constantly shifting conversation, people coming and going. Sol is aware of John’s arm resting against the back of the porch swing, the warm press of it against his neck when he leans back to laugh. They’ve been knocking back beers and John’s lost that stiffness he usually has; he’s even sung a snatch of Doxology in a funny nasally voice to mock a particularly strict Sunday School teacher he had as a kid. But just when Sol’s started to suspect that John’s effusiveness is just the beer in his system, he grows serious again talking to Neil. 

“You could’ve gotten in big trouble. You still might. How old was that kid?”

“He said he was eighteen.”

“You know he wasn’t,” Sol interjects.

“Fuck you, Sol. You ain’t exactly been around lately.”

“Bullshit,” Sol says, glancing at John as he withdraws his arm, crossing his wrists between his knees and staring down at his shoes. “I been around plenty.”

“But you haven’t been _present._ ”

“Since when do you give a fuck about how _present_ I am?” The possibility of hurting Neil feels very far away, as diffusely drunk as he is—drunk, too, on John, he realizes with a vague throb of panic now that he’s lost what little closeness he’d worked so hard to build up. But then he sees Neil’s face crumple—just this split second of something that looks like puzzlement that he knows means he’s wounded, but before he can say anything to fix it, Neil’s standing up and heading inside. “I’m gonna find Armie,” he says. Sol’s heartbeat is thick in his throat: Neil hurt is Neil dangerous. 

“I’d better go too,” John says, but makes no move to stand.

“Wait,” Sol says. “Wait.”

John regards him quizzically, not quite looking him in the eye. Sol glances around: they’re the only ones out there, though they can still hear music and laughter spilling from the open sliding door along with a tilted rectangle of yellow light. 

“Let me kiss you goodnight,” he says, hoping it comes out sounding less pleading than it sounds in his head.

John has that look on his face like a scared rabbit again, wide-eyed and frozen, but this time Sol leans forward and captures his mouth as softly, as gently, as he knows how. He feels John’s breath halt, feels him stiffen; for a moment Sol’s sure he’s going to pull away. But then he yields, presses in, opens: it’s a soaked kind of warm, like the drenched tint of light through stained glass.

———

They sneak around the edge of the house, finding a dark stretch of vine-carpeted side-yard, and Sol pins John to the wall. John’s clumsy at kissing, all softness and hesitation, but he faithfully copies each move Sol makes and even startles Sol by being the first to slide his thigh up between his legs, pressing back against the way Sol’s hips are ground in against his. Sol can’t tell if he’s trying to make him feel good or make space between them, so he pulls his away and asks, “are you ok with this?”

John’s close enough that he can feel his breath; more, he can feel in a way he can’t articulate John tilting toward him, pushing to meet him. “Don’t make me think about it,” he says.

“Well, you _need_ to think about it. I don’t wanna be a fucking mistake.” 

“This can’t be a mistake, Sol. There’s no way.” His tone is uncertain, like a scared kid in a haunted house. “It’s like this,” he continues tentatively. “I’ve been...” he glances around and drops his voice, “...like this _for_ ever. And I’ve been praying about it and praying about it. And I’m not saying God ain’t there, but He’s not answering any of my questions on the matter.”

“Does he... usually answer?”

John shrugs. He’s shivering, Sol realizes, and puts his arms around him without even thinking about it, crushing him like his strength could cover him up, heat him through. 

“Please, Sol,” John murmurs into his shoulder. “It’s all right. It’s all right. Please.” 

Inside they make their way past the last few revelers awake. Neil and Armie are nowhere to be found, and Sol’s damned glad for it. Sol collapses onto the battered green leather couch in the den, the first unoccupied room they come to. 

“Your makeup’s messed up,” John notes, settling in next to him.

“Well, your halo’s on crooked.”

“That’s all right. I don’t even know where my wings are.”

They sit awkwardly hip to hip for a moment, staring into the darkened room. A pool table stretches out before them like a dark swimming pool and on the other side of it a dartboard stares from the wood paneled wall. The streetlight from the window slices orange onto the far arm of the couch. Sol grabs the scratchy afghan from the back of the couch and slings it over his shoulders before turning to John and gentling him down. He pulls the blanket over them both and in the blind dark their bodies meet like praying hands. 

Sol can feel John sucking little bruises onto his neck and he lets him, though Neil will kill him for it. Then his hands, fingers still cold, are sliding up along his hips and side. Sol sits up long enough to unzip his hoodie and get a good look at John, his face illuminated by the street light—Sol had laid him there just to see him clearly, his voluptuous lips softly parted and his cheeks and collar smudged with Sol’s makeup. Sol wriggles out of his hoodie and shirt and John’s hands are on him right away, his fingers raking lightly down his chest and ribs. Sol gasps and grapples with John’s fly. 

“Can I touch you?” He asks, a grin in his voice. 

“Yeah,” John answers breathlessly, “yeah.” Sol works him loose and sees what he can in the dark: John’s uncut and so thick it feels like a gift from God and he tells him so.

“That’s bordering on blasphemy,” John says, wiggling back under the blanket and pulling it over them both to the shoulders.

“Straight men don’t get blessed with dicks like this.”

“Geez, Sol, can you just— _oh._ Yeah, that.”

“Like this? Fuck, look at you—has anyone ever touched you like this?” John shakes his head. He’s beautiful right now, so pretty Sol can barely look at him straight on. his hips lift to meet each pistoning of Sol’s fists and his eyes keep fluttering shut; each time, he opens them again, as though daring himself to look Sol in the eye. Something heady charges the air between them, as bright and charring as lightning. Sol feels a dam open at the gate of his throat and he just starts talking, saying things Armie never needs to hear and Neil doesn’t want to: how lonely it is, he sees now, to be fucked like they fuck him. It’s an ecstasy that offers no sustenance. Convoluted masturbation is what it is, jerking it into and against one another’s bodies. But this—what he could have here if he’s careful—it’s the thing he finds in the tall grass when he lies down in it at dusk.

“We’ll be so good together,” he hears himself saying to John, who’s writhing like wildfire beneath him, one hand splayed on his chest and the other groping for his cock through the thick cotton of his sweats. “I’ll make it so good for you, so gentle. Like I’ve dreamed about so many times. Use my entire body to make you feel good—find all those sweet little secret places—I can’t wait— _fuck_ —“ he slips his thumbs into the waistband of his sweats and shimmies them down over his hips, then wiggles til his length and John’s are nestled side-by-side. Then he takes John in his hand again. “—all those sweet spots,” he repeats, “the good places inside—“

And what he means isn’t just the brittle, wondrous shock of coming; not just the simple heat of bodies pressed together. He can have that. He does have that. What he means is—he thinks of how it felt standing there with John, looking out at night crawling in from the edge of town. The world feeling big again like when he was a kid who checked out books from library about the names of birds. Tangled branch and spread sky. The fragmented palette of winter’s opening edge, all black and indigo and raw gold. “—I’ll be so good for you, baby.”

“Say that again,” John manages. “Call me that again.”

“Baby,” Sol murmurs, nestling his mouth into the fevered notch where jaw meets throat. “You’re my baby now.” Gently he presses his lips and tongue against John’s pulse point and tastes how it spikes as he comes, whimpering and shaking. 

“Yeah,” John says, panting and raising his mouth to be kissed as the aftershocks recede, “yeah.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning for use of homophobic slur.


	4. Chapter 4

The light in the ER lobby is crushingly bright. Sol’s flanked by Neil and Mrs. Armitage in blue plastic seats, and he keeps sucking in the chill antiseptic air like maybe with the next lungful he’ll have enough to slow his heart, still his limbs. Cast calm on the shivering waters of his blood. He wonders if it’s too early to go out for another cigarette: the last one was ten minutes ago and Neil will follow like a nasty cough. But he rises anyway. Slowly Mrs. Armitage raises her slow blue eyes to meet his and he has that feeling like he’s had since he heard about Armie’s overdose that he should tell her something, anything—reach beyond the platitudes he’s already meted out. He owes her. It’s a funny feeling like she’s almost pulling something out of him with that glittering miserable gaze of hers. Rocking a loose tooth, unraveling a hem. He pats the pack of smokes in his pocket and heads toward the sliding glass doors. 

The smoking area is a picnic table beneath a dingy corrugated overhang. Neil follows along behind, faking a hangdog air. Sol seats himself at the far end of the table and Neil follows, sliding in opposite him. Sol stares past him like he’s not there: parking lot, bare trees, thin flat overcast. It smells a little like rain and woodsmoke but more like the gnarled, stringy stench of old smoke. 

“His Ma said he said it was because of you,” Neil says quietly, sounding pleased with himself.

“You told me,” Sol mutters. “You couldn’t fucking wait to tell me.”

“Well, I thought maybe you wanted to talk about it.”

“Nope. And I didn’t sell him the fucking pills, did I?” 

“He loves you. We all do.”

“You don’t love anyone, Neil. Anyone or anything. You’re just fucking empty and I’m sick of it.”

Neil tries to seem stunned, sad—and it’s funny, because he _is_ , Sol knows it and he’s sorry for it, but he’s playing it all wrong. He’s half posed as a sulking child—convincing enough with his big, gleaming eyes and narrow shoulders, bowed now around his shallow chest—and half nonchalant, and neither is genuinely _him_. It’s like he’s a small thing nested in something big and echoing and that is a difficult thing to be, Sol reasons. He feels his rage give like thin ice beneath the heel of a boot; he feels an apology shaping itself in his throat—but then Neil cocks his head and sinks the cherry of his Marlboro light squarely into the knob of Sol’s wrist. Real casual, like he was just flicking it. 

_Enough._ He grabs Neil by his hair and slams his face into the table. These two acts are neatly, forthrightly performed. Like rote steps of a ritual. When Neil sits up, his face is a mask of blood from nose down, and he’s howling with laughter. Before he knows where he’s headed, Sol’s in his car and peeling out of the lot toward the freeway. He just weaves in and out of traffic until there’s only his hands on the wheel, the automated decisions of navigation. It begins to rain, steep hard slanting rain, and through it he drives without thinking of it to John’s apartment. 

John had disentangled himself around dawn, explained miserably that he needed time to think, and hadn’t spoken to him since. He’d ignored his calls and hadn’t come to the door when he visited, though he did (he learned through Armie) give two weeks’ notice from his job. It had stung Sol deep, mostly because it didn’t surprise him none, which in turn made him feel like a goddamned fool about the whole thing. Now he walks up to John’s door right calm, like he’s an invited guest, sucks in a deep breath, and pounds on the door. After several seconds the blinds in the tall window next to the door flutter, but there’s no answer.

“You’d best let me in, John,” Sol shouts at the door, “or I’m gonna start hollerin’ about what I’m here for.” A scuffle, and the door slides open a crack. John’s face on the other side is pale, stubbled-over. Next door a small dog barks frantically and over the field a deep buffet of thunder elbows out from the throat of a towering wall cloud. John just stands there, staring.

“I wish you hadn’t come, Sol,” he says at last.

“You really mean that? I ain’t here to beg, so if you mean that, I’ll go.”

John steps back and walks away from the open door. 

“Ain’t no invite in but I’ll take it,” Sol grumbles, but then the smell of the place hits him—weed, garbage, unwashed laundry. Drive-thru sacks and cartons are shoved into corners, held in place by emptied cans and bottles. Laundry is strewn across the floor, the couch. A good host even now, John clears a spot on the loveseat for Sol, shoving a pair of jeans—tightie-whities still tangled in them—and what appears to be a journal and a Bible study book—to the floor.

“How’s it going?” John says tensely.

“Better for me than for you, looks like. But shitty all the same. Where the hell have you been?”

“Your arm, Sol!”

“Neil got me with his cigarette,” he explains. It chimes with pain when it’s mentioned and it’s looking bad, a little red ring around a pulpy pocket the yellowy-white of moth larvae. He rebuffs an urge to prod at it. 

“On purpose?”

“Does it look like an accident?”

“We have to clean it right away.”

“Right away, huh? Give you something to do I guess.”

His bathroom is marginally cleaner than the rest of the place, which is reassuring: personal cleanliness must be closer to godliness than the house and habit kind. John holds his breath and hand trembles as he holds the burn up to the light.

“So are we gonna pretend nothing happened?” Sol asks. “Is that the deal? Because I goddamned told you beforehand to think good and hard—“

“—please don’t take the lord’s name in vain under this roof.” His voice is low as he turns Sol’s wrist side to side under lukewarm water.

“Well, I beg your pardon but it don’t feel too sanctified here under your roof right now.” He tries not to wince as John pats the burn with a paper towel before going to kneel in front of him to dig through the cabinet under the sink. For the barest moment he sees—feels—John’s eyes flick across his lap so he spreads his knees a little more. Let him look, maybe catch a scent. He’s near enough, he could just turn his head—John flushes and ducks behind the cabinet door. The sound of rummaging. Then a stack of Penthouses slides out, all glossy and crisp. The cover of the topmost one features a blonde with waves down her arched back, her breasts like halved softballs pasted her chest. 

John just shoves them back inside. “My dad bought me those,” he said. “A missionary and a man of the cloth. Would you believe it?” 

Sol says nothing. He doesn’t want to talk about skin mags or intolerant fathers. He’s got this big empty impatient feeling inside his chest, a kind of sourness he knows could turn mean. 

John emerges with a box of band-aids and a tube of ointment, looking disconcertingly intent. 

“I can do this part myself,” he says. “You already got your good deed done, washing the whore’s feet and all.”

John gapes, appalled: god, he looks good like that. Like when Neil and Armie got him spooked the first time they met. He thinks backwards and forwards at once and has this sudden singular sensation of having known John since forever. Not his name or his face, but there was always an emptiness in just his shape. Yet this doesn’t erase his hurt, his rage, which only blooms hot beneath every part of him as John’s mouth works at nothing. 

Finally he says, “I just needed time, Sol.”

“I see you been using that time real efficiently.” He snatches the band-aid and ointment from John and busies himself with them. “Look,” he says in a softer tone, “I just thought we had something. And you just fucking disappeared.”

“Do you know what all of this means for me? Do you have any idea?”

For the second time that day, Sol feels his rage dissolve in the face of mercy. But this time any pain that’s coming is going to be real pain, is going to scar.

“Then tell me,” he says softly. “You always coulda just told me.”

After it was over, after Sol’s nimble hands wrung from him a pleasure that felt forever, a rocking impossible swell that pierced him and spread like delirious fever—something about the way he called him _baby_ ; that was indescribable—they twined themselves up in each other on that little game room couch and tried to sleep. At first, John was vastly, unfathomably happy. But then when he finally drifted off—Sol’s breath sluggish and hot in the nest of his collar—he dreamed of The Ecstasy of St. Teresa. It’s an old statue, one he’d seen pictures of in books. Carved of gold and white marble, it depicts the saint in a state of ecstatic languor, her head lolled back and her body heavy with the sapping weight of her pleasure. A mischievous angel fingers her garment with one hand, softly, as a lover might, and with the other clasps an arrow. Raining down on this tableau, shafts of gold. In the dream, he enters the room where the statue is, genuflects, gazes up into the saint’s face. And it begins to change. The features quake and blur; the pristine white takes on depths of grimy gray. The angel’s features thin and vanish until both faces are blank and smooth as so much wall. Then St. Teresa’s face swings open like a little crawlspace door and blood pours out in a tide. 

He sat up and tried to disentangle himself without waking Sol but Sol, sleeping thin, was up right away. He told him he needed time to think and a shadow crossed Sol’s face, a stung contraction of his features, and all of him, every molecule save his nightmare heart, strained to lean forward, to stay, to reassemble what had felt like a holy oneness. Holier, sure, than anything he felt in the wood and wine and organ-song carnival of the church, the feverish and surreal privations of missionary work. _Here_ before him was what he sought. He knew it then and he knows it now but he walked away anyway. 

Because it was not easy to disassemble twenty-five years’ worth of inculcation. At first, he intended to try. But the more he studied on it the more he returned to his conviction that it was a sickness, that what he and Sol had done was sin. He did not go so far as to believe Sol of the devil but rather a test he had failed, and, having failed once, would not assay to try again. Yet at the same time, it sucked at him; sin on one side and loneliness on the other, and the days rolled on flat and dark and cold. He got high and watched television, mostly. MMA, boxing, old movies on AMC. One night, Night of the Hunter was on, and he felt just like those two children in their boat, carried down the dark cricketsong river, in flight from something terrible. Drank too. These were lesser sins. Slovenliness and sloth and drunkenness, all lesser sins. But all through it he nursed a vision of Sol like a piece of hard candy beneath his tongue: that sin he was not ready to atone for.

Now here he is, sitting next to him at the foot of his bed, and John doesn’t wish to explain any of it. No matter which way he goes about it, the words turn to ash on his tongue. But he does his best, and in turn Sol tells him about Armie, overdosing on oxy on account of Sol not loving him enough, about how he got the burn after. He tells about how Neil introduced Armie to opioids in the first place, about how Armie and Neil are at once enemies and friends and he feels split like a wishbone between them. They talk until it begins to be dark out but the rain keeps on steady, a silvery drumming against the window. John lets his head slide down into Sol’s lap as he listens, and Sol strokes his fine, soft hair. 

Slowly he winds down. It’s not that he’s out of words—he wants to tell the world to John and wants it told back to him; he wants to talk until he’s used up the whole of the alphabet three times over, but his breath runs thin and the way John nuzzles the crown of his head into his lap with his eyes fixed intently on him—the mood shifts, the body wakes. So he falls quiet and they sit in warm, weighty silence for a few minutes, Sol just stroking the fine softness of John’s hair. Normally Sol would already have his hands and mouth all over someone he felt so good about, but he’s terrified of spooking him again. Like he’s that blind spot in the corner of the eye that disappears if you try to look at it straight on. But then John sits up and kisses him lightly on the mouth, just one soft chaste brush of their lips together.

“Sol,” he says, “I want you so bad I can’t breathe sometimes.”

“Yeah?” Sol grins as though he’s not terrified. “Want me like how?”

“You know like how. Please.”

John’s bedroom reminds him of a hotel room, except more drab. There’s nothing on the walls. The bed juts into the middle of the room, just mattress and boxsprings heaped up with tangled tan and white bedding. Tan blinds, tan carpet. There’s a tall black shelf with a few books and a framed photo of John and his parents from a long time ago. John gets up and turns this photo to face away, which makes Sol smirk as he reaches and drags him back onto the bed. 

“The light,” John says. “I was gonna turn it off.”

“Nuh uh,” Sol mutters as he hooks his leg around John’s waist. “I wanna see you.” He drops his mouth to John’s ear. “I wanna see how your face looks when you come.”

John makes an indescribable little noise, a sort of whimpering moan in his throat, and pulls at Sol’s shirt. Sol leans back and gives him what he wants, grins big as he marvels at his pierced nipples. He grazes his fingers whisper-light over them and gazes into his eyes with a kind of wonder as he closes his lips around them, sucking and licking. His hands and mouth are clumsy, reverent, curious; Sol realizes not without awe the immensity of what this means to John. He is his first. It is not the same as how he and Armie gave themselves to each other years ago, an awkward and painful figuring-out; rather, John is offering himself into Sol’s hands. It is a grave responsibility, not to harm him. He does not deserve this: but this thought he tucks beneath his tongue like when he’d hide his pills at inpatient. Spit it out later. John slides to his knees before him and mouths the heavy curve of his cock in his pants, nuzzles against it, inhales deeply. Sol takes his chin in his hands and lifts his face. “Is this what you want to do?” He asks quietly.

John swallows. “I want both,” he says earnestly. “This and the other thing too.” He drops his dilated gaze then lifts it again to meet his. “Let me have just a taste. Then you can… you can fuck me.”

The profanity on those lips more accustomed to prayer: if any part of Sol believes in God it quakes now for he’ll surely be damned for how powerful and dizzy it makes him feel. “Go on then,” he says, unzipping his fly. John eagerly pulls him out, hand trembling, and licks a broad, hot stripe from root to head before closing his mouth around the tip and sucking softly. His evident inexperience conjures a sort of protectiveness in Sol and a kind of excitement too. If he thought he wouldn’t desecrate that sweet mouth right quick he’d let him work at him in that fumbling, pure way all night long, but fevered as he is he He pulls him up to the bed and helps him out of his clothes. He looks good: lithely muscular, pale and trim down to the thatch of dark hair from which prick juts gorgeously thick and straight. 

“Jesus Christ, you’re beautiful,” Sol says softly. 

John ducks his head with a bashful smile. Then he looks worried. “Is it gonna hurt?”

“It might feel … strange at first. But then it can be the best thing. Be easier if you trust me.”

A pause, then: “I trust you.”

He whimpers when Sol breaches him with his finger and Sol lays his other hand on his hip. “If you need anything,” he says. “Need me to stop, slow down—“

John shakes his head and Sol kisses the inside of his knee. “Good boy,” he murmurs, and John’s whole body trembles. 

It takes a long time and several reminders for John to _just breathe_ before he’s ready for him, but John doesn’t mind. He’s memorizing his face; he’s listening to the shifting rhythm of his breath. John’s beauty and trust feel like an offering by which he’s humbled, elated, terrified. And then when he’s finally prepared, and asks John one last time if he’s certain that he wants this, he realizes he has never been more afraid of refusal in his life. But John only nods, impatient, his tongue flicking out to wet his lips. So Sol enters him as slowly as he can, watching him close his eyes—wince, gasp— _are you okay, baby, is it all right?_ Sol asks and John nods, _yeah,_ he says, _oh, gosh, yes,_ and Sol loves it, loves him, and lowers himself to kiss him on the mouth with such quiet intensity it is just like he is praying to him.


	5. Chapter 5

Sol’s dreaming of something bad and familiar when he’s woken by John’s mouth between his thighs. One dream softly effacing the other, a tidal watercolor shifting. He pulls the blanket down off of him and looks down at John, who takes over with his fist to smile at Sol and ask if it’s all right. 

Sol grunts assent and lets his eyes sink shut again. He’s a slow waker, surfacing through this liminal heaviness like a diver rising through silver depths. John goes about his work with an innocent, nervous fumbling that makes Sol hard right away, even if he won’t be able to get anywhere without instruction. He likes having been the first inside him, the first in his mouth and in his bed. Not just because of some proprietary alpha male bullshit but because it is not given—or taken—lightly. Sol’s even thinking about giving a sweet little speech about how much this particular dick-sucking means to him when John pushes himself down deep, gags, and brings himself off him coughing and grinning. He wipes off his mouth with the back of his wrist, impales himself again, and this time pushes on down until he’s got the whole thing in, root to leaking tip. Instinctively, Sol cups John’s head in his palm—his bleached hair so fine and soft and short—and begins to roll into him, careful not to be rough or forceful.

He could be, though, if he wanted to be. They’d talked about it the night before. John let Sol smoke inside since it was still raining out, sitting cross-legged and naked next to the open bedroom window. The slats of rain cut through the smoke and carried it down to the ground, and Sol remembers watching, half-hypnotized by the steady, drumming slant as he listened to John talk about it, how he wanted to be held down and have his face fucked, how he wanted someone to come on his mouth and cheeks.

“Would you do that for me?” He’d asked earnestly, as though asking for help moving some furniture around.

“With that pretty mouth on you? Hell yeah,” Sol had answered without hesitation, but now he’s not sure. John opens his mouth and lifts himself most of the way off, gazing up at him all puppy-eyed before enclosing him completely again, his throat knitting around him as he works his mouth back down. He doesn’t want to dirty his face, not this morning, even if it is just to please him: it’s a strange beginning, and feels like bad luck of some kind. Or a desecration. He tells John so, tripping over his tongue apologizing, but John just nods and keeps on, intent on his labors. Then his breathing gets slack and his work gets messy, Sol’s dick popping out of his mouth every few passes. 

“Fuck,” Sol breathes, realizing John’s fist is pumping away in his pajama pants. “That’s hot. You planning to dirty your britches or you wanna show me what you’re doing?”

“I… ok.” There’s a hesitation there that Sol vows to explore later. He watches as John steps unceremoniously out of his clothes, pulling his white pocket-tee over his head and shimmying out of his plaid pajama bottoms. Sol grins as John bows over him. “You’re perfect,” he says. “Thanks for not running off again.” 

“Well,”’John says, with no trace of irony in his voice, “it’s _my_ apartment.”

Afterwards—John makes a face like a kid taking medicine, but he swallows it down neatly enough—they shower together, and Sol gives back as good as he got. John’s face when he comes is something holy, the sounds he makes like a litany of prayer. They dry off and Sol changes into some clothes of John’s, a too-tight t-shirt and sweats that cup his ass. He feels self-conscious at first, being a man who usually dresses loose, but John can’t stop looking at him and he likes that—the worn jersey knit tight against his pierced nipples, the outline of his cock in the snug sweats. He’s been leered at before, but John’s almost gaping, and in the same way he was so inexperienced at sucking him off there’s a purity to it that touches something very primitive in him at the same time it warms him, makes him giddy. 

After a fumble on the couch, neither of them trying to get off but just saying good morning, sweet and quiet-like with their tongues and hands and grinning like idiots into each other’s neck, John busies himself in his narrow galley kitchen. Sol sits at the table, watching how he moves. Neat and quiet and quick. Soon he’s whistling, and Sol recognizes the hymn from the days, so far receded into the past that they possess now the surreal cardboard rigidity of a dream, that he, too, feared God: feared Him as terribly as he loved His sons. Someday he’ll tell John about it, and ask John for an accounting of his own faith. Curious, Sol supposes he is, and afraid too, like maybe there’s still time for Jesus to steal him back. _Well,_ he thinks, _Jesus doesn’t suck dick like I do._

Then he remembers the name of the hymn. _Doxology_. Later, he will swear that that moment—those four starched syllables rising from the dark water of his hind brain—was charged with a kind of black electricity, that in the exact same second that he recalled the name of the hymn he knew with equally searing certainty that something was about to happen. Then came the pounding at the door, and he knew as sure as his name that it’d be Neil standing there. 

———

Armie’s mouth is denim dry and it feels like someone’s striking at the back of his eyeballs with a ball-peen hammer. It had rained the night before, he recalls, for he’d woken and slept and dreamed and woken again and the rain was there all through it. Terrible, illogical dreams, scrambled up. _Nearly lost you,_ he recalls Alex saying, though how that can be he doesn’t know, because he remembers only taking the pills and Neil stroking his hair, funny of him to do something so sweet, but then he was puking and then there was—nothing. So much nothing. Now a watery sun filters through thin overcast, lighting the top edges of bare branches and Armie looks out at them and shivers and pulls the stiff hospital bedding up as far as he can. He’s never liked winter and nothing seems more wintry than to do this shit in winter, to overdose in a cold wood-paneled bedroom and then to wake here, a place menially purgatorial. (He thinks of Sol and feels, curiously, nothing, but only because he can’t afford to.) 

A haunchy nurse bustles in and adjusts his pillows, asks him what he’d like for lunch. He doesn’t want anything: hospital food’s bad anyway, bland paste formed into various shapes. Then a tall form appears in the door, arms crossed, with a suave, tight smile. Fucking Alex, always appearing at the right time like a train arriving at the station. Not luck or the universe’s charity but just how it is. But Armie’s glad to see him and even more glad—astonished—when there in front of the nurse he leans down and kisses the corner of his mouth. Still, he waits til she leaves before he asks how he is.

“I’m fine,” Armie says.

“You’re not,” Alex says. “How are you?”

Armie shrugs. “Did you bring me anything?”

“Don’t be a brat.” Then, reaching into his coat pocket, he pulls out a pack of cigarettes and sets them on the tray next to his head. “You’ll wait until I’ve left, of course.”

“Yes, daddy,” Armie mutters, and a pained expression crosses Alex’s face. “You seen Sol or Neil?”

“If I see Neil I’ll kill him.”

“Oh, baby, don’t be mad at him. I’m the one who took ‘em.”

“I know. But I _can’t_ be mad at you.” Alex sighs. 

“I don’t know what to tell you.”

“I worry for you. Always.”

“Then go find yourself somebody smarter.” Armie’s voice is hard and small and he won’t meet the older man’s eyes. There’s more love there than he can take: it’d be like holding his breath underwater. 

“There’s no one else, and you know it.”

“I mean, you did give Neil 200 bucks for the privilege of showing him how bad you are at sucking dick.”

“Yeah,” Alex laughs. “That was a regrettable choice.”

“You don’t even care, though. That’s the thing.” 

“That’s what thing?” His head is cocked, truly puzzled. It’s a good look for him, he who’s so sure of everything he says and think and knows what everyone else means too. He made up his mind to be an ob-gyn when he was fourteen, and never looked back. He married because he was certain he should, made children because that was the requisite next step. And when Armie, waiting tables at a kitschy family diner, struck him breathless he recognized what he felt as love with forthright, helpless certainty, and acted accordingly. Armie resents this neatness in him, this assumption that good luck goes on forever. 

“You know what I could do with 200 bucks?” He asks.

“Do you need 200 bucks? I can give you 200 bucks.”

“Forget it.” He’s drowning in all the things he can’t explain. He _is_ stupid, but so is Alex, so is Neil, everyone loving the wrong person. Except Sol, who seems to have got it right, but fuck him. 

“All right. Done.”

“So…”

“Come stay with me.”

“What’s wrong with you?”

“You’ll go through rehab first, naturally. And I’d prefer you cut ties with Neil.”

“And Sol?”

He sighs and his eyes crinkle into a sad smile. “Just don’t fuck him anymore, please.”

“It’ll end badly.”

“It doesn’t have to.”

Armie chews on a hangnail. “Take me out for a smoke,” he says after a moment. “I’ll think about it.”

“You really should quit,” Alex says, making a face. “But ok. Where’s your coat?”

**Author's Note:**

> There’s some unpleasant humiliation stuff like a little bit of bootlicking but not a major thing.


End file.
